Join-calculus

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The join-calculus is a process calculus developed at INRIA. The join-calculus was developed to provide a formal basis for the design of distributed programming languages, and therefore intentionally avoids communications constructs found in other process calculi, such as rendezvous communications, which are difficult to implement in a distributed setting. [1] Despite this limitation, the join-calculus is as expressive as the full π-calculus. Encodings of the π-calculus in the join-calculus, and vice versa, have been demonstrated. [2]

Contents

The join-calculus is a member of the π-calculus family of process calculi, and can be considered, at its core, an asynchronous π-calculus with several strong restrictions: [3]

However, as a language for programming, the join-calculus offers at least one convenience over the π-calculus — namely the use of multi-way join patterns, the ability to match against messages from multiple channels simultaneously. [4]

Implementations

Languages based on the join-calculus

The join-calculus programming language is a new language based on the join-calculus process calculus. It is implemented as an interpreter written in OCaml, and supports statically typed distributed programming, transparent remote communication, agent-based mobility, and some failure-detection. [5]

Many implementations of the join-calculus were made as extensions of existing programming languages:

Embeddings in other programming languages

These implementations do not change the underlying programming language but introduce join calculus operations through a custom library or DSL:

References

  1. Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 1
  2. Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 2
  3. Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (1995). "The reflexive CHAM and the join-calculus".{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help), pg. 19
  4. Petricek, Tomas. "TryJoinads (IV.) - Concurrency using join calculus". tomasp.net. Retrieved 2023-01-24.
  5. Cedric Fournet, Georges Gonthier (2000). "The Join Calculus: A Language for Distributed Mobile Programming": 268–332.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. "JErlang: Erlang with Joins". Archived from the original on 2017-12-08. Retrieved 2015-04-18.
  7. Join Python, Join-calculus for Python by Mattias Andree
  8. Yigong Liu - Join-Asynchronous Message Coordination and Concurrency Library